Mourning in America

While Liberal progressives are mourning in America over the election of a sociopath as President of the United States, Christian dominionists are rejoicing at the election of a Christian fundamentalist as Vice President. As news and social commentators scramble to explain how this happened, the line of descent from Reagan to Trump is revealed in such publications as Religion Dispatches magazine.

Understanding Christian fascism in the US, however, requires a lesson in Christian Right politics, whose overwhelming success in subverting American democracy is attributable to the supreme strategist Paul Weyrich, the right-wing analyst who made the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush possible. For those bewildered by the current incoherence, Jerome Himmelstein’s book To The Right patiently follows the transformation of American conservatism brought about by social movement entrepreneurs like Weyrich, who brokered the marriage of conservatism with dominionism.

While this and other writing on the madness of the US right-wing is worth our attention, it is useful to keep in mind that the alternate version of capitalist faith in the free market — otherwise known as neoliberalism — also offers a limited and dogmatic view of modern development that actively represses authentic democratic organizing and self-determination — what some of us would call freedom.

Writing at Talk to Action, Bruce Wilson in 2012 exposed the Christian Jihad meetings taking place after hours in America’s public schools. Good News Clubs and other Christian fundamentalist indoctrination like Child Evangelism Fellowship, reported Wilson, are using the public schools to generate support for murder of non-believers worldwide — a legacy concept that in earlier times engendered genocide against Native Americans. As part of the New Apostolic Reformation that propelled neopentecostal politicians like Sarah Palin into the mainstream media, American evangelicalism is reinvigorated by their Biblical-oriented calls to crusade.

In 2011, Rachel Tabachnick discussed Christian Dominion and the Uganda prototype. As a charismatic movement of world conquest founded on bigotry and murder, this form of faith professed by such notables as Sarah Palin threatens democratic aspirations worldwide. As Tabachnick noted, Uganda’s legislated death penalty for homosexuality was just the beginning.

As Jack Crow wrote in 2010, Sarah Palin’s breed of Charismatic, Latter Rain theology desires both World’s End, and an ‘end times’ theocracy, to enact the Holy Nation Perfection which will induce God to send Jesus back. As Crow observes, “That’s about 25% of the US population, right there. And they all need Jews to behave a certain way (up to and including dying off) in order to get God to notice all the nice white people in the States, who want into heaven.” A great warmup for the Rapture.

In 2009, Author Frederick Clarkson reminded us that when Christian Patriot friends of Sarah Palin do things like murder federal judges or attempt to assassinate members of Congress, there’s a reason. Part of that is brain damage, but the catalyst for Constitution Party members and other vigilantes is demonizing by right-wing demagogues, especially Christian Reconstructionist preachers. Remember the Oklahoma City bombing?

In 1994, Jim Halpin and Paul de Armond wrote The Merchant of Fear, which noted that the board of governors on the powerful and ultra-secretive Council for National Policy (CNP) included such familiar right-wing stalwarts as former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, founding president of the Heritage Foundation Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell and Oliver North. Front Lines Research, a Planned Parenthood magazine, called the CNP, “the central leadership network of the far right in the United States.”

For readers who wish to understand Christian fascism in the US, INSiGHT journal, Volume 2, FALL 2016 examines religious hysteria in America, and the spiritual warfare of Puritanical conservatism against socialism and the indigenous peoples’ movement.